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BRIEF REMARKS 



ON THE 



" WIFE" 



OF 



*' Uxor invicH——' esse nescis ? 

" Mitte singultus, 



Hob. 



NEW- YORK: 
PRINTED BY GRATTAN AND BANKS, 

Corner ofJVassau ^ Spruce Streets. 



1819. 



BRIEF REMARKS 



t^m 



WASHINGTON IRVING. 

Our countryman, Mr. Washington Irving, now in 
England, is occupied, it seems, in a work he calls 
*' The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gentleman,^^ 
coming out in numbers ; No. 1 containing an article 
entitled as above, " the wife;" consisting of an ob- 
servation, a smile to illustrate it, and a narrative or 
fact to prove it. A few brief remarks on each in 
their order. 

The observation may be abbreviated, and without 
injury to it, to import, " that women sustain the 
reverses of fortune with fortitude ; that disasters, 
which break down the spirit of a man, call forth all 
their energies ; and that the wife is the supporter of 
the husband under misfortune ;" Now, all this is 
very true, but is it not also very trite ? Can it be a 
question, whether the wife possesses not, and, at 
least equal to what we can boast of it, for the hus- 
band, the " ne cede malls, sed contra audentior ito;^^ 
never to yield to the ills of life ; on the contrary, the 
more numerous and sore, she the more collected and 
unwearied to resist them? Her spirit in another 



view of it. The husband, dubious of succeeding^ 
and whatever the purpose, may pause, and faulter, 
and, if left unsustained by the wife, would ultimate- 
]j faint and abandon — no hesitation or retrospect 
with her ; witness Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth ; 
perhaps his masterpiece, if any thing can be selected 
from him so to be distinguished. The character 
within the limits of truth and nature, still may it not 
be asked, whether a limit to the mind that could 
conceive it ? so that really Mr. Irving has taught 
us nothing we did not know before ; yet, as we are 
to believe, he meant to say something complimentary 
or civil to the sex, possibly to make amends for a 
delinquency in never having addressed one of them 
in the " ivay of courtship,^^ it might be viewed as 
ungracious were it otherwise than well received. 

The simile runs thus ; — " As the vine, which has 
long twined its grateful foliage around the oak, and 
been lifted up by it into sunshine, will, when the 
hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round 
it with its caressing tendrils, and bind its shattered 
boughs ; so it is beautifully ordered by providence 
that woman, who is the mere dependant and orna- 
ment of man in his happier hours, should be his 
stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity, 
winding herself into the rugged recesses of his na- 
ture, tenderly supporting the drooping head and 
binding up the broken heart." — 

I object to it, as too long — count the folio, and 
probably it will be found as long again, either as 



Addison's, " So the staunch Hound, &c." or his, " So 
when an Angel, &c.," hitherto the longest on records 
It is irksome to the mind to be detained in examining, 
as it proceeds, whether the simile, and the person or 
thing to be likened, agree throughout, as much so as 
to overlook a boy's exercise in making of Latin to 
see if no false concord. 

I use the phrases, count the folio, and on record^ 
presuming them to be familiar to Mr. Irving, he hav- 
ing been once engaged in the study of the Law. He 
quitted it because, as is supposed, rather dry, and on 
a calculation, that although he might improve by it 
in the faculty of thought or judgment, he would suf- 
fer proportionably in his native gift of imagination ; 
and in which he was doubtless correct, it not being 
impossible that, had he continued in it a portion of 
time longer, he would have found himself utterly 
unequal to his Knickerbocker History of New^-York ; 
certainly a total absence of Quiz, the very life and 
spirit of it. The like as to his story of Rip Van 
Winkle and his Wife of the Kaat's Kill. Pray what 
makes Mr. Irving spell the Old Dutch name Kat's 
Kill with double a ? It has also a place as an article 
in the Sketch Book, and as of the Knickerbocker 
genus of composition, inasmuch as both Rip and his 
Wife are wholly of Mr. Irving's creation, there never 
having been any such etis or existence m rerum na- 
tura as a scolding Dutch Wife. Not that the Dutch 
Wife never scolds ; she scolds her servants ; she 
scolds her neighbours ; but she never scolds in quality 



as Wife ; she never scolds her Husband. — This has 
been ascribed hy some to the judicious manner ia 
which the Dutch formulary of matrimony is framed, 
where, instead of relying on obey, honour, love, and 
so forth, none of them of import so definite as to pre- 
clude construction, the Wife is made explicitly to 
promise to be silent ; and though not exactly mar- 
ried within the four walls of a church, which has 
been imagined to add to the solemnity of the cere- 
mony, it must be acknowledged on all hands, that 
no where is the wife found so scrupulously observant 
of the marriage vow as among the Dutch. 

The non-existence of the Scolding Wife involves 
the non-existence of its correlative, the Henpecked 
Husband. Indeed there is no word in the Dutch an- 
swering to the English henpeck. Should any con- 
ceited Englishman take occasion, from this single 
instance of defect in the Dutch, to boast of the co- 
piousness of his own, language, I would remind him, 
there are innumerable words and phrases in French 
not to be expressed in English. Vide Simond's Tra- 
vels passim. 

From the preface to the Van Winkle article, it ap- 
pears Mr. Irving intended it as a supplement or se- 
quel to his History of New- York. Acute critics have 
thought Homer ought to have stopped at the Iliad, 
but his muse grew vain, '' in plausus ambitiosa ;" a 
note on the passage takes a distinction between plau- 
dit and fame ; and " like a little demon whispered, 
Homer write more^^'^ and he wrote the Odyssey ; sup- 



••« 



posing however, for the sake of illustration, the His- 
tory to be Mr. Irving's Iliad, and the Article his 
Odyssey, I do not think he has fallen off much, if 
any thing, and that he is as funny and fancilul in the 
last as in the first. 

I object further to the simile as wanting simplicity 
and unity, the " simplex duntaxat et unuin,^^ of the 
Master. " The great secret in writing," says the 
compiler of a recent school-book with a few plain 
sensible pages on style, "is to know when to be 
simple, ^^ 

The simile sets out with likening the wife to the 
vine twining itself around the oak. it was of the 
vineti-culture of the ancients, to add a word, my 
mite, to the nomenclature, to lead or train the vine, 
in order to expose the clusters to the sun, upwards 
along the trunk of a tree to the boughs ; the tree 
however was the elm and not the oak. " Ulmistjue 
adjungere vites,^^ to adjoin the vines to the elms, 
says Virgil. " Ego vidi pampineis oneratam vitibus 
ulmum,^^ I have seen the elm burdened with the vine 
luxuriant in shoots, says Ovid. The wife is not only 
the vine ; but, by twining, or leading, or training, 
herself around the tree, she becomes her own vine- 
dresser ; the instant thereafter, however, the tree, 
being spoken of as lifting up the vine to its boughs, 
is apparently the vine-dresser. There obviously is 
some confusion or interference here, and how to ex- 
plain it I am altogether at a loss : to make the hardy 



8 

plarit stoop down, and lift up, being certainly beyond' 
my contrivance. 

For thf^ sake of accuracy in citation, I repeat Mr. 
Irving's epithet for the oak, the hardy plant ; the 
prose hardy plant is one that will bear frost, and 
drought, and to be browsed and cropt, and yet thrive. 

The wife is not only a vine and a vine-dresser ; but 
almost instantly again, still as wife, she is, as it were, 
likened to a small hawser passed round a ship along 
her sides in a tempest, the sea-term for it I think is 
frapping, to save her, when her fastenings are giving 
way, from separathig, " She clings round the tree to 
bind up its shattered boughs when rifted by the thun- 
derbolt ;" the precise condition of the tree in the case 
cited from Ovid, " scBvofulmine tacta Jovis,^^ touched 
or struck by Jove's dire lightning ; but there, as w^e 
have seen, the vine, instead of performing a good 
office to the tree, avails herself of its boughs, shatter- 
ed as they may be, for her own accommodation. 
Ultimately the wife becomes the prophet, or rather, 
as we are in New-Testament times, a female Bar- 
nabas, a daughter of Consolation, " She is to bind 
up her broken-hearted husband." 

1 am aware Mr. Irving may vouch, as precedent 
for multifariousness of figure and imagery, the fol- 
lowing much admired passage from the discourse of 
De Witt Clinton, Esq. before the literary and philo- 
sophical Society, he being President, After inveigh- 
ing, and very properly, against " invective in our 



" political writings, that it lias greatly tended to in- 
" jure our national character^ and that it has arisen 
" from the indiscriminate applause conferred on cer- 
" tain eminent political writers," the passage alluded 
to follows : — " We imitate, what we are taught to 
" admire, and unfortunately we have aped their 
" boldness of invective, and fierceness of denuncia- 
<* tion, without exhibiting those fascinations of genius 
" which operate like the cestus of Venus, conceal 
" deformity, and brighten all the charms of beauty 
" and grace. Junius arose in the literary, like a 
" comet in the natural world, menacing Pestilence 
" and War, and denouncing, in a style of boldness 
" and invective, the constituted authorities of Great 
" Britain. He created a new era in political writing ; 
" his works have become the archetype and text 
" book o{ political authors ; and every juvenile writer, 
" who enters the political lists, endeavours to bend 
" the bow of Ulysses, and, striving to make up in 
" venom what he wants in vigour, mistakes scurrility 
" for satire, and ribaldry for wit, and confounds the 
" natron of Egypt with the salt of Attica." 

If the sentence immediately preceding where Ju- 
nius, the subject of the simile, is mentioned, is to be 
viewed as context, then we have Junius, in the first 
place, the cestus or girdle of the Queen of Love ex- 
hibiting fascinations ; secondly, we have him a co- 
met ; thirdly, an archetype ; fourthly, a text book ; 
fifthly, the bow of Ulysses, which our juvenile wri- 
ters, when they eater the Lists, strive to bend and 

2 



10 

so tilt with the Arrow as doubtless more handj than' 
as heretofore, with the Spear ; and sixthl}' and lastly, 
salt, seasoning, grateful to the palate or Taste., and 
whh which they confound xh^'w natron, the sal ammo- 
niac of the shops, offensive to the smell, and pungent, 
in the extreme, so that the phial containing it applied 
to the nostril nigh takes away your breath. " Enough 
to vex one, even if a Saint," almost to say, confound 
them for it ! 

Ihe Narrative, 
According to Mr. Irving, it was casually recalled 
to his mind by observations made on a previous oc- 
casion by another, which he, at the moment, was 
repeating in the article, and so not originally in his 
view as a component part of it. It may be redu( ed 
to the following facts. " A friend of Mr. Irving 
'' marries a beautiful accomplished girl ; to the hus- 
" band he gives the name of Leslie, and to the wife 
<' the name of Mary ; the latter the Heroine of the 
" article furnishing the name, " The Wife." Leslie 
" has an ample fortune, and it was his mishap to 
" embark it in large speculations, and by sudden 
" disasters, it is swept from him, and he reduced to 
" almost penury — for a time he keeps his situation 
" to himself; at length he comes to Mr. Irving one 
" day, and relates it to him. Mr. Irving inquires of 
" him, whether his wife knows it ; at which he bursts 
" into tears, and cries, for God's sake, if you have any 
" pity on me, don't mention my wife !" Must we not 
intend here that Mr. Irving remains to be notified, that 



11 

invocation of the Deity as expletive^ no longer tole- 
rated? — " Leslie finally discloses it to her, and when 
" Mr. Irving asks him how she bore it ? he replies, 
" like an angeV^ Angels being preserved from ad- 
versity by a Power, an attribute of which, " not 
" subject to accidentSy'^ how are we to know how 

they would bear it ? — One, it is true, failed^ and 
most disasterously so ; and how he bears it, w^e, of 
our own race, and wofully to our own cost, know. 

" Leslie then disposes of his dwx^lling house, and 
" sells all his splendid furniture except his wife's 
" harp, and takes a small cottage in the country, a 
*' few miles from town. Mr. Irving one evening ac- 
" companied him to the cottage, and, as they ap- 
" proached it, they heard the sound of music ; it was 
*' Mary's voice singing a little air of which her hus- 
*' band was peculiarly fond." Does not Mr. Irving, 
by making Mary to sing, make her a little too light- 
hearted ? " She, expecting her husband, had set 
" out a table, under a beautiful tree behind the cot- 
" tage, with some delicious strawberries she had 
*' been gathering, and excellent cream for him." 

It is to be collected from the narrative, that Mr. 
Irving has laid the scene in New-York ; now, it may 
be said, with very little, if any, deviation from the 
literal truth, that the whole island shews neither 
cottage nor dairy, and the few roods left untilled, 
scarce soil sufficient to nurture a strawberry vine. 
We will perceive whence the mistake, upon advert- 
ing to it, that the article was written in England, 



12 

where a portion of the habitation is cottage, and' 
the gardens furnish strawberries, and the pastures 
milk, most abundantly; and that Mr. Irving has 
been so long abroad, that thetopography of the spot, 
his home, has passed from his remembrance. 

The mistake by him is as to place. A similar 
mistake by Sir Henry Clint6n, the British Com- 
mander, at the battle of Monmouth, in the war of 
our revolution as to time, A week passed before 
he prepared his despatch, or his report of it, to his 
government, and at the close he writes, " that he 
" took the position from whence the enemy had been 
'' first driven after they had quitted the plain ; and, 
^* having reposed the troops till ten at night, to avoid 
" the excessive heat of the day, he took advantage 
" of the moonlight to rejoin General Knyphausen." 
— It was already the second quarter of the moon 
and the evening consequently light, so that even the 
circumstance, that there was an eclipse of the sun on 
the 25th of the month, and of course no moonlight 
so late as at ten in the evening of the 28th, the day 
of the battle, never suggested itself to his recollec- 
tion. Again, — a similar mistake by a general of our 
own, as to event. The battle of Bridgewater was on 
the 25th July, 1819; it commenced about the close 
of the day, but after three or four hours, the com- 
batants not being able to distinguish friend from foe, 
in the dark, the firing ceased on both sides, and, 
as it were by concert, at the same moment. For 
the numbers engaged, and the time it lasted, sel^ 



13 

dom a more well fought little fight. The British 
fell back to collect and form anew, and wait for the 
dawn, to advance again ; which they did, and, 
finding none to oppose them, took peaceable posses- 
sion of the ground, and of the cannon they lost the 
preceding evening. Our troops returned to their en- 
campment on the Niagara, where they arrived about 
12 o'clock at NIGHT. The General's report of the 
battle is dated a fortnight thereafter, by which time, 
it would seem, he had conceived it to have issued 
in victory. His words are, " As I was retiring from 
the field, I saw mid felt that the victory was complete 
on our part, if proper measures were promptly adopt- 
ed to secure it," The improvement of these three# 
several instances of mistake is, that when to relate 
as from our own testimony,'* there is nothing like the 
time and place prese7it,^^ lest, by waiting, our memo- 
ry should either, not serve us to remember all, or 
serve us overmuch, and so remember more than all. 

The narrative winds up, " that the world has since 
*' gone prosperously with Leslie, and that his life 
*' has been a happy one ;" but, referring to the 
meeting when the regale of strawberries and cream, 
*' that he never afterwards experienced a moment of 
" such unutterable felicity." 

Ought not Mr. Irving, according to true drama, 
to have left him in the cottage ? — If the heroes and 
heroines, who die on the stage, were all brought 
back to life, would not the tragedy, as to its effect 
to " toake the soul, and mend the heart," be entire- 



u 

Ij spoiled by it? — At the same time, for the sake, 
of verisimilitude in the fiction, it is perhaps as well 
the narrative should end as it does ; it being un- 
doubiedly according to the usual or natural course of 
things, for one in business^ and especially if embark- 
ed in speculations, and whether large or not, or he 
a fortune or not, quite immaterial, lo fail, and give 
up, and sell off, and again, and within less time than 
from the crescent to the full orb, in credit, and cash, 
and as busy, and prosperous, as ever. In truth, and 
in a sense, a speculator never fails. Insolvency and 
not a failure, however in terms, not always a contra- 
diction in fact. Direful the stroke indeed if not a 
^bre of the root left, as having escaped untouched, 
to nourish the stock for the shattered boughs to shoot 
forth anew ! 

The speculator of our own age, emphatically so, 
Napoleon Bonaparte, an instance in point. — He has 
failed four times. — The third time he took the beyie- 
fit of the act, and went to Elba. — The fourth time, 
the period of his career was short ; scarce beyond 
the usual bank credit ; and he is now within the 
limits in St. Helena; and notwithstanding he each 
time went off, leaving his indorsers in the lurch, it is 
surmised he has friends, cherishing a hope he may 
yet be liberated, and ready again to trust him ; so 
that it is difficult to pronounce definitively even as to 
him. 



15 

A little Narrative of my own. 

I was lately at tea, on an invitation from a family 
where I visit — the party not numerous ; and the ar- 
ticle, THE WIFE, becoming a subject of the conver- 
sation, during the evening, one of the ladies, Mrs. A., 
repeated the passage from the simile, and which, as 
I understood, she had committed to memory for the 
beauty of it : — " Woman, the stay and solace of 
** man, when smitten with sudden calamity ? 'wind- 
" ing herself into the rugged recesses ol* his nature ; 
" tenderly supporting the drooping head, and bind- 
" ing up the broken heart ;" and, addressing herself 
to Mrs. B., asked her what she thought of it, and 
whether it was not beautiful ? Mrs. B., avoiding a 
direct answer, expressed herself, " I like taste and 
*' style, as far as I can judge of it, as well as others ; 
" but when I read, I look for something more, and 
" which I am sure 1 will not find if I do not under- 
" stand what I do read. I have a husband ; no wo- 
" man ever had a better ; and my fear is that I am 
" not thankful enough for him ; and should misfor- 
" tunes overtake him, I hope it will be given to me 
" to know I am to bear a full share of them ; in 
** sickness, these hands, and no others, shall support 
" his drooping head ; but how am I to understand 
*' that he has recesses in his nature, and that they 
" aie rugged, and that I am to wind myself into 
" them ; indeed, and after all, Mr. Irving may write 
*' very beautifully and very movingly about it, still 
" I make it a query, whether one never married can 



16 

" know any more of the love between husband and- 
" wife, than, as they sometimes say, one born blind 
" can of colours ? — " Does it occur to you, madam, 
" replied Mrs. C, that the famous Doctor Saunder- 
" son, though blind from the first year from his 
" birth, lectured on light." " True," rejoined Mrs. 
D., the widow of a College Professor ; " but then it 
" was, as my husband would say, for 1 remember 
" his very words, scientifically or aritjicially only, 
" and not as ever having cfijoyed vision." — 
Here the discussion ended. 



FINIS. 






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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



016 117 720 9 




